Given the chance, how would you impact this dying world?

… the sad reality is that most people who desire to impact the world simply spend most of their time arguing, and most of the time without any effectiveness or weight. So many people want to leave their mark on the world so badly that they don’t care whether or not that mark is a scar. I don’t remember where I heard that, but it’s not original with me. What if you could do something now to help heal the hurt?

I was sitting at my desk preparing for Sunday’s sermon one evening. A woman contacted me who had stumbled across my blog. All she asked for was a Bible. In her context, she was unable to get one. She just wanted to read the words of God and study them to understand. There I was using my nice study Bible, almost 700 books on the bookshelf behind me (most of them to help increase biblical understanding), probably 20 Bibles and a few of them Study Bibles, and one really nice (and normally expensive) goatskin leather NKJV that I didn’t even have to pay for. My whole life was wrecked in that moment. This woman just wanted a Bible, more than anything else.

This is the year of evangelism at our local church, The Church at Sunsites. Apparently, it is the year of evangelism for my personal ministry as well. It always amazes me just how God is working all things together.

For eight years I have been developing content and publishing. The audience has grown tremendously and I only have God and you to thank for that. On January 1st, I announced that I was going to pursue church-planting through this personal ministry. My commitment to God was that I would walk through any door He opened. Well, as I write this it is March 1st. Things fell into place so quickly; it almost seems like God has been working this together from before the foundation of the world. I realize again that in following Christ there has never been time for me to get comfortable or to get used to the way things were. God moves with great urgency. We have a church plant in West Africa and plans to build an orphanage and elementary school there. Through technology, I am training pastors there, meeting with our team leader almost daily so that we can talk about the Bible, ministry, pray together, and hopefully a network of church-planting churches will be the result.

I am now in a position where I need to raise funds to support this mission work. It costs much less than you’d think. We are not sending missionaries or employing anyone. We are training locals to do the work of ministry in their own countries (or states or whatever). Funds are mainly needed to rent worship facilities and to provide food for impoverished people.

I am calling on you, my friends. All of the regular content that I’ve been developing will still be available. I have also developed a $5 monthly paid subscription to support our missions efforts around the world. To meet current needs, we need 400 committed paid subscribers by March 20th. Paid subscribers receive 2 print books/year and a monthly e-newsletter. I think this is doable. In fact, it’s exciting!!!

Let’s feed people who are starving to death. Let’s feed people who are spiritually dying. Let’s provide homes for former Muslims who were exiled because they decided to follow Jesus at all costs. Don’t wait for someone else to do something. I’m not. $5/month is so little to ask for. How can a people who have so much do so little? Please answer this call.

Start Bible Studies and Christ-centered churches around the world (yes, also in the US).

Anything else we can do as we plant churches and with the goal of the good ministry of the Word.

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will travel to such and such a city and spend a year there and do business and make a profit.” You don’t even know what tomorrow will bring — what your life will be! For you are like smoke that appears for a little while, then vanishes.

Instead, you should say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” But as it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. So it is a sin for the person who knows to do what is good and doesn’t do it (James 4:13-17).